Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

  ‘Not possible,’ José said. ‘The fish will go off. Why don’t you go home and rest? I’ll sell.’

  ‘If we’re selling, then let’s do it together,’ I conceded. ‘I’ll just grin and bear it.’

  As we were driving past the castle-like walls of the Hotel Nacional, I had a sudden stroke of inspiration and yelled, ‘Stop!’

  José stepped on the brakes. I got out of the car in my bare feet and poked my head through the hotel gate to look around. ‘Hey, hey, psst. . .’ I called out quietly to Antonio at the counter.

  ‘Ah, Sanmao!’ he greeted me loudly.

  ‘Shh, don’t be too loud. Where’s the back door?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Back door? Why do you want to go in through the back?’

  Before I had a chance to explain, the manager walked past. I hid behind a pillar in fright. When he stuck his head around and saw me, I fled swiftly to the car outside.

  ‘I can’t do it! I’m too awkward to make a sale.’ I held my head in my hands, angry at myself.

  ‘I’ll go.’ José threw open the car door and strode out. My dear José, he really has the bluster.

  ‘Hey, you. Señor Manager.’ He waved his hands at the manager, who came over. I hid behind José’s back. ‘We have fresh fish. Do you want to buy some?’ José’s tone was cool and calm, neither humble nor pushy. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all, though I was pretty sure he was.

  ‘What? You want to sell fish?’ The manager looked at the scruffy clothes we were wearing. A look of distaste came over his face, as if we’d insulted him. ‘Go through the side door to sell fish,’ he said scornfully, pointing. ‘You can discuss it with the people in charge of the kitchen…’

  I shrank even further into myself and desperately tugged at José. ‘See, he can’t stand the sight of us,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and sell elsewhere. We’ll have to see this manager at future cocktail parties…’

  ‘This manager’s an idiot. Don’t be afraid of him. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen.’

  All the kitchen staff surrounded us like they’d never seen anything like this before. ‘How much per kilo?’

  The two of us looked at each other and didn’t know what to say. ‘Um, fifty pesetas,’ José offered as an opening price.

  ‘Yes, fifty,’ I reaffirmed quickly.

  ‘Alright. Give me ten fish and let’s weigh.’ The person in charge was very polite.

  We were extremely happy and flew back to our car to pick out ten big fish for him.

  ‘You can take this slip to the accountant after the fifteenth to claim your money.’

  ‘You don’t pay cash?’ we asked.

  ‘We’re a public office. Please bear with us!’ The person in charge of buying fish shook hands with us. We got a statement showing that we would receive more than a thousand pesetas for this first batch of fish. I looked it over carefully before putting it safe and sound in my pocket.

  ‘Alright, let’s go to the Didi Hotel now,’ José said.

  The Didi Hotel has a grand reputation in the Sahara for providing free meals to labourers. By night it’s a bar, with rooms for rent upstairs. The outside is painted peach pink. Inside the lights are green, and they play pop music all day long. There are always herds of Caucasian women dressed to the nines doing business inside. The labourers who come from Spain to fix the roads head to the Didi Hotel as soon as they receive their pay cheques. When they get drunk, they get thrown out. Their month’s-worth of hard-earned income largely disappears into the pockets of these women.

  When we got to the front of the hotel, I said to José, ‘You go in. I’ll wait outside.’ After waiting for almost twenty minutes, he still hadn’t reappeared. I carried a fish and went in after him. I reached the counter just as a very sexy ‘didi’ was touching José’s face. He stood there like a real lemon. I strode over, glaring at the woman, and said loudly, ‘Want to buy some fish? Five hundred a kilo.’ I slammed the dead fish in my hand on the bar counter, where it landed with a thud.

  ‘How can you just raise your prices willy-nilly? Your husband just said it was fifty a kilo.’

  I gave her a dirty look, thinking to myself that I’d raise the price to 5,000 a kilo if she dared touch José’s face again.

  José pushed me back out of the hotel. ‘You’re causing trouble,’ he said under his breath. ‘I almost sold the entire lot to her.’

  ‘Take it or leave it. Are you selling fish or selling your charms? I can’t believe you let her touch your face.’ I raised my hand to hit José. He knew he was in the wrong and covered his head, letting me swat at him.

  In the midst of my fury, I rushed back into the hotel to grab the big fish I’d left on the bar.

  The sun was high in the sky. We were hot and hungry and thirsty and tired and angry at each other. I wanted to throw out all of the fish, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  ‘Do you remember Paco, the cook from the desert corps?’ I asked José.

  ‘You want to sell to the troops?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Without a word, José began driving towards the desert corps campsite. Before we got to the barracks, we saw Paco walking on the side of the road.

  ‘Paco, do you want to buy fresh fish?’ I called out to him, full of hope.

  ‘Fish?’ he asked. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In our car. We have more than twenty.’

  Paco stared at me and shook his head furiously. ‘Sanmao, there are more than three thousand people at this camp. You think twenty fish would be enough?’ He refused me in one fell swoop.

  ‘Who knows? Why don’t you take it and give it a try? Jesus fed more than five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish. What do you have to say about that?’ I retorted.

  ‘Take a lesson from me and go and sell them by the post office,’ Paco advised. ‘You’ll find the most people there.’ Of course, our prospective customers had always been Europeans. The Sahrawi don’t eat fish.

  So we ended up going to the stationery shop to buy a little blackboard and some chalk. We also borrowed a set of scales from the owner of the grocery store, whom we knew. On the board, I drew a jumping red fish and wrote: ‘Fresh fish for sale, 50 ptas/kilo.’

  We drove up to the front of the post office. It was five in the afternoon. All the parcels and letters flown in by airmail had just arrived. A huge crowd of people was checking their mailboxes, a lively scene indeed. We parked, put the blackboard in our car window and opened up the boot. By the time we had everything all set up, our faces were already pretty flushed. We sat on the pavement, barely able to look up at our potential customers.

  Crowds of people kept passing, but nobody stopped to buy any fish. ‘Sanmao, didn’t you say we were dilettantes?’ José said to me after sitting a while. ‘Dilettantes don’t need to rely on selling their leisurely pursuits to make a living!’

  ‘You want to go home?’ I was feeling pretty lacklustre about it myself.

  Just then, one of José’s colleagues walked by and saw us. He came over to say hello. ‘Hey! Just chilling out?’

  ‘No.’ José stood up in embarrassment.

  ‘We’re selling fish.’ I pointed to our car in the street.

  This colleague was an old bachelor, a nice and sturdy fellow. He walked over to examine the blackboard and the open car boot and finally understood what was going on. He came back and pulled both of us into the street. ‘If it’s fish you’re selling, you have to shout it out! You can’t be so shy. Come, come, I’ll help you.’

  The co-worker casually grabbed a fish in his hands and raised his voice. ‘Yoohoo, fresh fish for sale! Seventy-five a kilo! Yoohoo! Fish!’ He had unexpectedly decided to raise the price himself.

  When people heard his shouts, they began to gather around immediately. We were pleasantly surprised. The twenty or so fish were really no big deal. We sold them all in an instant.

  We sat on the ground counting our money and found that we’d made over 3,000 pesetas. When we went to look for J
osé’s co-worker, he’d already walked off chuckling into the distance.

  ‘José, we have to remember to thank him!’ I said.

  We were bone-tired when we got home. After showering, I went to the kitchen in my bathrobe and boiled a pot of water, throwing in some pasta.

  ‘We’re having that?’ José asked unhappily.

  ‘Let’s keep it simple. I’m exhausted.’ To be honest, I didn’t even feel like eating.

  ‘We’ve been toiling since early morning until now, and you’re making me pasta? I won’t eat it.’ He was mad now, putting on clothes and getting ready to leave.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I yelled.

  ‘Out to eat.’ Looked like someone had suddenly become a blockhead. I had to change clothes and chase after him. As for eating out, of course there was only one place to go: the restaurant at the Hotel Nacional.

  In the restaurant, I quietly nagged José. ‘Only you could be so stupid. We’re ordering the cheapest thing on the menu, got it?’

  Right at that moment, we heard a clap and saw one of José’s bosses coming over to us. ‘What a coincidence,’ he cried. ‘I was just looking for someone to eat with. Let’s all eat together.’ He came and sat down without further ado.

  ‘I hear they have fresh fish in the kitchen today,’ he continued, speaking mostly to himself. ‘How about it? Let’s have three orders. It’s not often you get this kind of fresh fish in the desert.’ When you’re used to being the boss, you forget to pay attention to those around you. Without asking us, he told the waiter, ‘Lettuce salad, three orders of fish. Bring the wine first. We’ll look at dessert later.’

  The foreman in the restaurant was the same guy who bought the fish from us earlier in the day. When he passed our table and saw José and me eating the fish that we’d sold him for twelve times the price, his jaw dropped, aghast. He looked at us as if we were crazy.

  When it was time to pay, we fought over the bill with José’s boss. José ended up winning and put down our earnings from the fish we sold by the post office. We only got a little bit of change. Only then did I realise that, whether it was fifty or seventy-five a kilo, we had undersold. We were in the desert, after all.

  The next day, we slept in very late. I got up to make coffee and do laundry. Lying in bed, José said to me, ‘At least we still have that income from the Hotel Nacional to pick up. Otherwise, yesterday would have been a total disaster. We lost all our gas money. Let’s not even talk about how hard we worked.’

  ‘Speaking of income – that invoice…’ I started shrieking and flew into the bathroom to shut off the washing machine. I dug out my trousers from all those bubbles and reached a hand into the pockets to feel. That statement had long since been soaked to shreds, a soft white pile. There was no way to put it back together.

  ‘José, the last fish slipped away! Time to eat potato cake again.’ I sat on the stone steps outside the bathroom, laughing and crying at the same time.

  Seed of Death

  Ramadan is about to come to an end. The past few evenings, I’ve been going up to the roof to gaze at the moon because the locals tell me the first night of the full moon is when Muslims break their fast and celebrate. My neighbours have been killing goats and camels in preparation for the feast. I’m also waiting for the local women to draw beautiful patterns in dark brown-red henna on my palms. This is a necessary adornment for women of these parts during the holiday. Since I’m a big believer in following local customs, I want to do as they do.

  On Saturday, we didn’t have any plans to go out into the desert, so José and I stayed home reading late into the night. We slept in until noon the next day. After getting up, we went into town to buy the out-of-date Spanish newspapers that had come in by airmail earlier in the morning. We had a simple meal for lunch. Once I washed the dishes, I came back into the living room.

  José had his head buried in the newspaper. I lay on the floor listening to music. I was in a good mood because I’d slept so well. I was planning on going into town again that night to see a Charlie Chaplin silent film, City Lights. It was a bright and sunny day, no dust in the air. Beautiful music filled our small living room. This was the type of Sunday that made a person feel content and at ease.

  Around two in the afternoon, some Sahrawi children were calling my name through the window. They wanted big bags for chopped meat, so I gave them each a few colourful plastic bags. After distributing the bags, I stood and gazed at the desert. Across the street there were a bunch of new houses going up. The stunning desert scenery was getting blocked off, day by day. It was heartbreaking.

  A few moments later I noticed that two boys I recognised had started fighting nearby, a bicycle cast aside next to them. When I saw they were really going at it, I went over, hopped on their bike and rode in circles. This was really getting to be a brawl. I stopped riding and went over to try to break it up.

  As I was getting off the bike, I spotted a Sahrawi-style hemp necklace on the ground. Naturally, I picked it up. ‘Did you lose this?’ I asked the two boys, holding it out to them.

  When they saw what I had in my hand, they stopped fighting and jumped back quite a distance, a fearful expression on their faces. ‘Not mine, not mine!’ they said in unison, unwilling to even touch it.

  Puzzled, I said to them, ‘Fine. I’ll put it on my doorstep. If someone comes looking for it, tell them the lost necklace is by my door.’ With that I went back indoors to listen to music again.

  Around 4 p.m., I opened the front door and saw that the street was totally deserted. The necklace was in the same place. I picked it up and examined it more closely. It was three objects strung together: a small cloth sack, a heart-shaped fruit pit and a piece of copper.

  I’d long wanted a piece of copper like this, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in town. I’d never seen anything like the cloth sack or pit before. I realised how soiled this string of objects must have been, probably not worth a peseta. Maybe somebody had thrown it out because they didn’t want it any more. I decided I might as well take it myself.

  I happily showed off the necklace to José when I got back in. ‘Ugh,’ he said. ‘You just picked up someone’s rubbish.’ He went back to reading his newspaper.

  I went into the kitchen and snipped the hemp string with a pair of scissors. The cloth sack had a weird smell that I didn’t like, so I threw it in the bin. The pit also smelled bad, so out it went too. That left the rust-red piece of smooth copper, looking very much like a piece of bean curd. There was even beautiful white metal inlaid along its contours. It was quite different from the necklaces other people wore. I really liked it, so I scrubbed it clean with a cleansing powder. I dug out a thick piece of silk ribbon, strung the copper tablet on it and found that it fitted perfectly around my neck. It was a very modern look.

  I ran back to show José. ‘Looks great,’ he said. ‘It would go well with your low-cut black blouse. You should wear it!’

  With my new necklace on, I returned to listening to music. After a while, I’d completely forgotten about it.

  I started getting sleepy after listening to a few tapes. Something was not right. I’d only been up for a few hours. How was it that I felt so tired all over? I put the tape player on my chest because I was really groggy. This way I could change tapes without having to get up. The copper tablet around my neck just so happened to rest on the machine.

  Within a few moments, the tape player suddenly started winding up like crazy. The music sped up and the rhythm was all off. It sounded angry. José jumped up and turned the tape player off, looking it over in confusion. ‘It was fine earlier,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘Must be too much dust.’

  We sprawled on the floor again to test it out. This time things got even worse. The whole tape got tangled up. We used a hairpin to extract the messed-up tape from inside. José went to get some tools to fix it.

  While José was looking for his tools, I banged on the tape player with my hand. Whenever our electronics weren’t working, I fo
und that hitting them willy-nilly could usually solve the problem. No need to take things apart to fix them.

  I had just started banging on it when my nose started itching and I sneezed. I used to have very serious allergies and would sneeze all the time. My sinuses were always acting up. But then a Spanish doctor helped me out a while ago and I haven’t had problems since. When I started sneezing again this time, I muttered, ‘Ha, it’s back!’ and went to get toilet paper. Based on previous experience, I’d have a runny nose any minute now.

  The bathroom was mere steps away, but the sneezes continued to come. At the same time, my right eye began to feel uncomfortable. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eye was a bit red. I had to ignore it because my nose was starting to run.

  After I’d sneezed more than twenty times, I got the feeling that something was wrong. Back in the day, I would never sneeze continuously like this. I still didn’t pay it much mind, though, and went to get some medicine from the kitchen. But less than ten seconds after my initial flurry of sneezes was finished, I started sneezing up an even bigger storm all over again.

  José stood nearby, looking confused. ‘The doctor didn’t cure you after all!’ he said. I nodded, my hand over my nose, sneezing achoo, achoo. I couldn’t even talk and felt absolutely mortified.

  Once I had sneezed over a hundred times, I was a total mess from tears and snot. It was hard to stop for even a minute or two. I rushed to the window to breathe some fresh air. José went to get a cup of hot water from the kitchen and put in some tea leaves for me to drink.

  I sat down in a chair and took a few sips of tea, wiping my nose and feeling the redness around my eye grow warm. When I went to look in the mirror again, my eye was already swollen. It had happened so fast, in less than twenty minutes. I thought it was weird, but didn’t dwell on it because I needed to stop my sneezing first. The sneezes kept coming, a few times every minute. I held a wastepaper basket in my arms, wiping my nose and throwing the tissues in. By the time the next round of typhoon-like sneezes came over me, blood was coming out of my nose. I turned and said to José, ‘This is no good. Now my nose is bleeding!’